History of Independent Games
This is a history of Independent Games. This is meant as a skeleton structure which can be branched out on in order to fill this wiki. Indie Game Prehistory Very early game development can be considered independent, starting with Space War!, and including many early C64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, etc. games, but this is not our primary concern here. For practical purposes we'll begin later on. DOS Shareware/Demoware Era (late 80s / early 90s) The business model of most non-freeware indie games is shareware or demoware. This is when part of a game is free, and the rest the player has to pay to get access to. Some DOS games like Commander Keen and Doom used this model: usually the formula was one episode free, and the later two episodes the player had to pay for. The Era of Isolated Hobbyist Game Engines (1991-2004) ZZT (1991-) The earliest popular tool which allowed people to create games with minimal programming was the ZZT by Tim Sweeny (founder of Epic Megagames), which was not specifically made to be a game engine, but had a level editor so full-featured that it in practice became a game engine. Thousands of ZZT games have been made, and it can be taken to be the nominal start of amateur or hobbyist game development. RPGMaker (1992-) The RPGMaker series started by Japanese developer ASCII are a series of RPG-creation programs which became popular in the hobbyist game development community; tens of thousands of games have been made in it. Some of the more notable games made in this engine are The Way and Yume Nikki. Perhaps the most well-known game made with this engine is Super Columbine Massacre RPG! and stirred international controversy due to it's interactive rendition of the 1999 shooting at Columbine Highschool in Littleton Colorado. Inform (1993-) Inform is a natural language programming language designed by Graham Nelson to create interactive fiction. Clickteam (1994-) Clickteam launched Klik & Play in 1994, the first in a line of engines (the latest of which is MMF2). A community formed around it, and many modern indie game developers got their start with Klik & Play, such as Derek Yu and Arthur Lee. MMF2 continues to play an important rule, with notable games like The Underside and Knytt Stories using that engine. MegaZeux (1994-) Inspired by ZZT, this engine was designed for DOS text-mode games with customized ASCII graphics. Despite this ersatz implementation with limited graphics, it has developed quite a thriving community for nearly 15 years and which still has some outposts of old lovers. O.H.R.RPG.C.E. (1997-) The O.H.R.RPG.C.E. started as a DOS-based RPG-creation program which became popular in the hobbyist game development community; thousands of games have been made in it. VERGE (1997-2007) Another RPG engine which eventually was extended to be usable as a general game engine, notable for having a C-like scripting system. Had a relatively small community due to the relative complexity of making a full game in it. Game Maker (1999-) Game Maker by Mark Overmars is an all-purpose 2D game engine, and has become the most popular game engine for amateurs and hobbyists, with literally hundreds of thousands of games having been made in it, and with many indie developers getting their start in Game Maker before moving to other engines. Game Maker was later bought by YoYo Games. See also: Game Maker developers. Cave Story and TimW's Great Reunification (2005-) The indie games community was very fragmented, each existing as separate bubble communities; for instance there was the Clickteam community, the Game Maker community, and the Ohrrpgce community, with little cross-pollination or overlap. Typically even the best games made in the engines above wouldn't become popular outside of the people who used that particular engine; i.e. the only people who played the most famous Ohrrpgce games were other Ohrrpgce users. Although the IGF, a yearly independent games contest, started in 1999, the indie games community wasn't unified or even known by that name in those early years. This changed around 2005, with a series of events. A few major commercial independent developers became promoting themselves explicitly as "indie developers" -- most notably, Introversion, whose catch-phrase was last of the bedroom programmers, and who had major success in the marketplace with Uplink and Darwinia. Also in 2005, Cave Story was translated by Shih Tzu of Aeon Genesis; Cave Story was an enormously popular game and brought millions of people into the awareness that individuals are still making games on their own, on their own time, games which are often as playable and as high in quality as many mainstream games. Also around this time, The Home of the Underdogs stopped being updated. TimW, a fan of indie games in Malaysia, in reaction to that closing decided to start a blog which would cover all major independent game releases. TIGSource shortly followed suit, and for the first time there were two major blogs about indie games and the indie games community. The TIGSource forums started in 2007, further cementing the community into one place. Before this time, there was no cohesion to the indie games community, and only much smaller isolated forums and communities existed (the largest of which was probably the Dexterity Forums, which became the Indiegamer Forums. There were also Game Tunnel, which began in very late 2002 / early 2003, started by Russell Carroll of Reflexive which took a 'review crew' or 'Famitsu' approach to scoring indie games, but that site never had as strong of a sense of community, and both that site and the Dexterity forums were almost exclusively focused on commercial shareware indie games, and almost entirely excluded freeware and hobbyist games. Category:histories Category:top-level articles